Tag: English Literature

Bim Adewunmi shares her admiration for the British novelist and essayist:

“Smith, now 40, is a confidently quiet writer – sly and witty and acid sharp – who always draws a world that looks like the real one; it’s a welcome skill set in the often monochrome world of UK publishing. Away from long-form, Smith also writes short stories, interviews and journalism (I urge you to read her warm profile of comedians Key and Peele). But it’s her essays – covering ground from familial loss to comedy, advertising and city living – that I love the best. She’s smart, and she doesn’t hide it.”

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“It is with a certain bitterness that one must admit to oneself that the late S.S. Titanic had a ‘good press.’ It is perhaps because I have no great practice of daily newspapers (I have never seen so many of them together lying about my room) that the white spaces and the big lettering of the headlines have an incongruously festive air to my eyes, a disagreeable effect of a feverish exploitation of a sensational God-send. And if ever a loss at sea fell under the definition, in the terms of a bill of lading, of Act of God, this one does, in its magnitude, suddenness and severity; and in the chastening influence it should have on the self-confidence of mankind.”

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“Ballard was rather vocal about his provocative vision of the future during his lifetime, thanks to his interest in media and technology. The author envisioned a reality that has eerily manifested in many ways already, which we capture in these 20 quotes about Ballard’s vision for the future.”

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I had such a mistaken idea about Anita Brookner’s novels, until I picked up The Latecomers in a secondhand shop about 10 years ago, and read the first wonderfully concrete sentence. “Hartmann, a voluptuary, lowered a spoonful of brown sugar crystals into his coffee cup, then placed a square of bitter chocolate on his tongue, and, while it was dissolving, lit his first cigarette.” Somehow – I think because of the title of her Booker winner Hotel du Lac – I’d expected something ladylike, lavender-scented, prissy and precious; I knew as soon as I opened my eyes to her words that this writing was everything opposite to that.

Caleb Sivyer has just established an online resource for news, events, and publications on the writer and journalist Angela Carter. You can follow the Angela Carter Group on Twitter and Facebook. Take a look and see what you think!

Of the film adaptations that had been made of his work during his lifetime, JG Ballard vouchsafed to me that he liked Jonathan Weiss’s version of The Atrocity Exhibition the best. It was hardly a surprising verdict; the movie, released in 2000, eschews any of the easy certainties of narrative for a furious collage of extreme images – urban wastelands, nuclear explosions, penises rhythmically pumping in and out of vaginas – all to the accompaniment of a voice-over comprising near-verbatim passages from the quasi-novel. And as the book is a furious collage of extreme images, the film is of the highest fidelity imaginable.

Ballard also liked Steven Spielberg’s adaptation of Empire of the Sun, although more, one suspects, because of the opportunity he got to be an extra in a party scene that was set in a simulacrum of his parents’ interwar home in Shanghai. So tickled was he by this Möbius-looping of reality and the imagined that Ballard wrote about the episode in another roman-à-clef, The Kindness of Women. When it was announced in the early 1990s that David Cronenberg was to adapt Ballard’s apocalyptic tale of autogeddon, Crash, and moreover set it in Toronto, I was so exercised that I phoned the writer. “You can’t let him do that, Jim,” I protested (or words to that effect). “Crash is one of the great London novels. The city demands that it be set right here!” He was having none of it and gently talked me down: the point of the novel was to describe a global phenomenon, one Ballard termed “the death of affect”. It was quite irrelevant which city the film was set in – the important point was that Cronenberg’s affectless vision and planar cinematography, all lit at operating-theatre strength, strongly resonated with Ballard. (more…)

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“I was trying,” Mina Loy observed in 1927, with reference to her polyglot, punning, scholastic, asyntactic, unpunctuated free-verse poems, “to make a foreign language, because English had already been used.” So distinctive was Loy’s “logopoeia” (the term Ezra Pound invented to describe this particular poet’s “dance of the intelligence among words and ideas”), that it has taken the better part of the century for her to be appreciated for what she was–one of the central avant-garde poets writing in English. Indeed, Roger Conover’s collection The Lost Lunar Baedeker is more than a new edition of Loy’s poetry; it is the only available edition of her collected (although by no means complete) works. Together with Carolyn Burke’s long awaited biography of the mysterious Mina Loy, the Farrar, Straus collection (subsequently cited as FS) is thus a major literary event.

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From an 1984 interview with British novelist J. G. Ballard, relating his admiration for Beat writer William S. Burroughs

I have met Burroughs quite a few times over the last fifteen years, and he always strikes me as an upper-class Midwesterner, with an inherent superior attitude towards blacks, policemen, doctors, and small-town politicians, the same superior attitude that Swift had to their equivalents in his own day, the same scatological obsessions and brooding contempt for middle-class values, thrift, hard work, parenthood, et cetera, which are just excuses for petit-bourgeois greed and exploitation. But I admire Burroughs more than any other living writer, and most of those who are dead. [Read more]

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About

Rhys Tranter is a writer based in Cardiff, Wales. He is the author of Beckett’s Late Stage (2018). His writing has been published in the Times Literary Supplement and the San Francisco Chronicle. In 2016, this website was selected to become part of the British Library’s permanent UK Web Archive. [Read More]

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